Futureland: Dystopian vs. Post-Apocalyptic

I love our local bookstore. It's got cushy couches and informed sales staff and is designed to appeal to young adults and is about to open (squee!) a coffee nook. I also like how it's organized: a section for classics, a section for mainstream modern fiction, a tiny mystery section, no thriller section, and lots of speculative fiction. Fantasy is broken down into subcategories: swords-and-elves, urban witches, sparkly vampires, etc. One entire wall is dedicated to our terrible future: it's labeled "Futureland" and contains everything from 1984 to World War Z. 

No dictator, no dystopia

Based on the selections I've poked through on those shelves, let me tell you: the future sucks. It's either a nuclear wasteland, an overpopulated seething hothouse, or a giant prison camp run by a fey-yet-bloodthirsty madman. But it's unlikely to be all of those things at once. Dystopia and post-apocalyptic fiction are too often used interchangeably when they are not the same thing. They are both "futureland," as my bookstore so cleverly recognized, but with different visions of how things might look.

Dystopian fiction is usually about life under a repressive government. A utopia is an ideal society; a dystopia is not merely the opposite, but what happens when a government thinks it's got the answer to a perfect world and can only get there if it controls everyone and everything. Dystopias in real life (like the Soviet Union, like Taliban-controlled areas, like North Korea) are the result of rulers who try to bring utopias into fruition. In fiction, sometimes the higher aims of the repressive government are clear, sometimes it's not spelled out, but there's tyranny and the protagonist is trying to escape it. Dystopia is about social and political structures. The theme is revolution. Current examples: The Hunger Games, Divergent, Matched, On Such a Full Sea. Classic examples: Logan's Run, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Alas Babylon, Brave New World.

From Princeton.edu

Post-apocalyptic fiction is about life after catastrophe. Humanity has been decimated. Nuclear war is a popular antecedent, as is a superflu. Celestial events (moons wandering out of orbit, suns dying) are also useful for the end times. Unlike dystopian fiction, post-apocalyptic novels are typically more individualistic. There aren't many people left, so the survivors are trying to scrabble along through a blasted landscape. The antagonist is usually nature, not a government; when there are bad guys, they are usually feral humans, not dictators. The theme is survival. Current examples: The Road, The Age of Miracles, the Dog Stars, the MaddAddam trilogy, World War Z, The Passage, The 5th Wave, the Wool trilogy. Classic examples: War of the Worlds, The Stand, A Canticle for Liebowitz, I am Legend, and (if we include films) Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and Mad Max.

Dystopian: too much government
Post-apocalyptic: not enough government

There's some overlap. Many dystopian stories arise from the ashes of a catastrophic event: take the Hunger Games, with its vague references to a nuclear disaster. Divergent also seems to be set in a post-disaster world. On the other end, you've got the Wool trilogy, which leans toward post-apocalyptic but has elements of dystopian. The movie Elysium, which I confess I haven't seen yet, seems like it straddles this territory as well. It's not a dichotomy, then: a story can be both. However, most novels/films lean one way or another, and are mislabeled because people just think "crappy future" rather than revolution vs. survival.

I suspect both genres remain popular because they are so unfortunately relevant. As the western US descends into ever-worse drought, with horrific wildfires blasting our landscape every spring and summer, the end times don't seem so far-fetched. Our climate is changing, an apocalypse that seems to creep up on us like a slow deadly tide. And dystopian: as I read Adam Johnson's near-perfect novel The Orphan Master's Son, about life in North Korea, I couldn't help but think that our dystopian novels describe reality for too many people. Read I Am Malala, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Half the Sky, A Long Way Gone, and Sold, and you realize that dystopian societies really exist, right now, in this world.

Both story forms serve as a warning. We are showing you these lives, so that you may take another path. Is it a surprise young people, who are tasked with cleaning up all the messes their forebears have created, are so drawn to this bleak futureland?

All those moments will be lost in time ...

A Real Dystopia

I'm currently reading the scariest dystopian story I've ever read (and I've read a lot): The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson. It won this year's Pulitzer Prize, and it was about North Korea, so I thought I'd give it a go. I knew nothing about North Korea.

Korean children during the Great Famine

The book is fiction, but the story is true enough: that's what makes it so frightening. The novel follows Jun Do (think: John Doe), meant to be a North Korean everyman. We follow his journey from Dickensian orphanage, to surviving the Great Famine in the 1990s (in which millions perished), to his time as a Korean-English interpreter — he ends up at a surreal Texas barbecue with a senator — to, finally, a stint as Kim Jong Il's right-hand man. And since this is one of the worst dictatorships in the world, be assured that with each identity Jun Do assumes, he suffers in new and horrible ways. I had to skim the bit where the tattoo on his chest is sliced off with a boxcutter. (It does happen offscreen; it's still cringeworthy.)

As improbable as this plot sounds, in a land as completely upside down as North Korea, it seems plausible that all this could happen to one man. And Johnson researched the heck out of that strange country, including traveling to Pyongyang, the capital. (I'd like to know how he pulled that trick off without ending up in a gulag.) The details are made up, but the story is not an invention.

Lockstep love for the Dear Leader

Well, what is a "dystopia," anyway? Why do we always think of it as fiction? We think about books like the Hunger Games and Fahrenheit 451 as cautionary tales, as warnings that we in western democracies better keep an eye on our scurrilous leaders, else we'll have a President Snow forcing our children to fight each other to the death. But there are societies right now that are just as bad — worse — than these imaginary dictatorships. I'd rather live in the world of 1984 than in Johnson's North Korea. Both have their Big Brother, but you don't have rampant starvation and frozen gulag hellholes in 1984.  

"Dystopia" literally means "bad place." In fiction, a dystopia is usually a utopia where something's gone wrong. Some leader got it in their noggin that they could create a perfect society where everyone would be happy — if only everyone would obey. Usually the government in charge of this "perfection" has become incredibly repressive: you have to control every aspect of a place if you want your ideology to be pure and true for every citizen. Otherwise your plan becomes sullied by other people's ideas.

I've been drawn to dystopian fiction for a long time, and had the pleasure of reading Orwell's 1984 again this year. The Orphan Master's Son owes a lot to that book, which might be considered the first dystopian novel. Orwell was thinking about the Soviet Union, so it's not a surprise that the North Korea of Johnson's novel would so strongly mirror Orwell's fictional world: what is it about communism that lends itself so readily to dystopia?

It's not like capitalism is without its flaws. I also read The Grapes of Wrath this year, and I just finished Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, a nonfiction book which documents life in a slum in India — as the author says, much of the slum's structure is a result of global market capitalism. But the grimmest pictures painted by capitalism's critics just can't match the world depicted in The Orphan Master's Son. Whatever our society's flaws — and we have so many — we are not like that. Thank goodness we are not like that.

Your turn: have you read a fiction book that has affected (or even changed) your views of economic or political systems? What was it, and how did it shape you?